Ask the Oracle at Hotel Sorrento: Claudia Castro Luna, Robert Lashley, and Tara Conklin
Will you get that job you’re gunning for? Should you tell her you love her? Do you dare disturb the universe?
Our monthly divination series returns to the Fireside Room at Hotel Sorrento. Come with your most burning questions to ask this month’s featured writers: Seattle’s Civic Poet Claudia Castro Luna, Stranger Genius Award in Literature nominee Robert Lashley, and author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The House Girl, Tara Conklin.
How it works: Show up and write your questions down on slips of paper. Hand your anonymous questions to the enigmatic host, poet Johnny Horton. If fates allow, he will pose your question to the panel of writer-oracles, who’ll divine your fate by selecting a passage from their respective books.
Feel free to come at 7, get a drink, and write your questions down. Divination begins at 7:30 p.m.
Claudia Castro Luna is Seattle’s Civic Poet, the recipient of a King County 4Culture grant, and a Jack Straw Fellow. Born in El Salvador she came to the United States in 1981. She has an MA in Urban Planning, a teaching certificate, and an MFA in poetry from Mills College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, La Bloga, City Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, among others. This City, her first chapbook, is forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Living in English and Spanish, Claudia writes and teaches in Seattle where she gardens and keeps chickens with her husband and their three children.
Robert Lashley is the author of The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press). A semi finalist for the PEN/Rosenthal fellowship, he has had poems published in such Journals as NAILED Magazine, Feminete, No Regrets, and Your Hands, Your Mouth. His work was also featured in Many Trails To The Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and lyric poetry. To quote James Baldwin, he wants to be an honest man and a good writer.
Tara Conklin‘s first novel, The House Girl (William Morrow), was a New York Times bestseller, #1 IndieNext pick, Target book club pick, and has been translated into 8 languages. Her second novel, The Last Romantics, is forthcoming in 2017 from William Morrow/Harper Collins. Before turning to fiction, Conklin worked for an international human rights organization and as a litigator at a corporate law firm in London and New York. Her short fiction has appeared in The Bristol Prize Anthology and Pangea: An Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe. Tara holds a BA in history from Yale University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and a Master of Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School (Tufts University).
John Wesley Horton (aka Johnny Horton) co-directs the University of Washington’s summer creative writing program in Rome. He’s received a Washington Artist Trust GAP grant and his poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Cutbank, Notre Dame Review, Borderlands, and The Los Angeles Review.
